Tram nostalgia won't solve our transport problems
West Yorkshire, where I live, is the biggest urban area in Europe without a tram or metro system. There are plans to rectify this by spending £2.1 billion of government money on a tram system connecting Leeds to Bradford city centre and to link Leeds' main hospital to a large out-of-town shopping centre near Leeds United's football ground. Even if the cost of building the lines is halved, that's still over a billion pounds to build less than 20 miles of tramway.
Should we be asking if this is the best way to spend the limited cash we have for transport infrastructure? If building tramways is so troubled and difficult, why do we persist with the idea that having trams on our city streets is such a good idea? The proposals for Leeds don't provide any benefit for 90 per cent of West Yorkshire's travellers and our obsession with trams misses the fact that, in most places, the distribution of people and jobs simply isn't suited to fixed rail mass transit systems.
Trams, like other fixed rail systems, are an old technology. Leeds and Bradford built trams in the 1880s, discovered they had become loss-making and shut them down in the 1950s to prioritise cheaper, more flexible buses (and the private car). Since then waves of nostalgia have washed over our cities resulting in trams being seen as the only possible solution to urban transport challenges. The truth is, however, that building a tram network is an act of corporate indulgence, a sort of municipal 'keeping up with the Joneses'. Instead of moving to a new generation of transport, we are stuck with an expensive and inflexible 19th century technology.
And people don't use trams much. Across the UK, just 8 per cent of journeys were made on public transport and tram systems amounted to just 3 per cent of those public transport trips.
Even when we look at Manchester, with its substantial tram network, the share of journeys for this system amounts to less than 5 per cent. Manchester's trams also lose a lot of money, £39 million in 2023/24. If we get the 'tram building revolution' that Chris Curtis calls for, we will be spending billions on loss-making systems that, even optimistically, will amount for less than 10 per cent of passenger journeys. All while the roads where over 90 per cent of journeys take place are starved of both investment and maintenance.
If we are serious about transport investment then we should concentrate on investments that the private sector is prepared to finance like air travel, taxi systems, roads and work from home initiatives as well as ending the long term underfunding of roads maintenance. It may be the case that, as Centre for Cities tells us, urban density would make mass transit less loss-making but right now few of England's towns are big enough or dense enough to justify tram systems. Perhaps a brave mayor will tell the government their city doesn't need a tram and would rather finance experiments in autonomous vehicles, air taxis, better road signalling technology and app-based systems like North Yorkshire's YorBus rather than a tram system that doesn't solve urban transport problems and costs a fortune.
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